Poetry

Pussy hair

What’s become of those vast verdant black forests?
Tangled thatches hiding smiling snatches
Great wiry springy mattresses
Moist and musky
A mouthful of beard
Tickling naked nose and lips
The Brazilians first mowed the downy wild hairs
Trimming and shaping a woman’s wilderness into a
Groomed
Manicured
Love lawn
Playboy and porn sparked an orgy of
Erogenous pubic hair eradication
The rising Mons Veneris beams
Moonlight back into
Heavily browed eyes

—Chinchilla Vortex


Fear

Nineteen.
A boy.
A soldier.
Alone ...
Waiting for death.

The darkness clutching.
Seconds turning to hours.
Flak jacket soaked,
from heat ... from fear.

Shivering.
A single drop of sweat
trickles down his spine.
Black ice.

Humidity.
Booby Traps.
Stink.
Death…

The Jungle,
smothering.
Feeling isolated,
abandoned.

Biting his lip.
Blood trickling
down his throat.
He strangles back a scream.

The orders finally come.
Words penetrating blackness.
A nightmare
turns to horror.

He screams, “Fuck it”
charging forward through the terror,
into fear.
Into...Death.

What will they tell his Mother?

—Phillip Cole


Happy May Day, all you pinkos!

It was much like any other time: the people
were anxious and the youths lusted; youth
being not yet of the people, and the people
not yet the aged, who are, or were, beyond
even anxiety. I argued outside class with
my favorite teacher, the communist/socialist

long term substitute (Our original teacher
had suffered, or been awarded, a heart attack
from which he would grudgingly recover.) who
claimed to have once challenged a former
astronaut to a game of parachute chicken
in an election year, Mr. Lavery. My point was

that there always have been wars, always will,
that the difference lies only in the technology
we inflict upon one another. His argument was
that, for the first time in the history of our sad,
funny species, the stakes were our entire world.
Thirty years later, I concede the point.

—Todd Young